Either side of the Atlantic, the news is a soggy sack of wet squirrels

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Here in the UK, a lot of us look over the sea towards the US and scoff mercilessly at the state of their news media and political discourse. “Oh ho ho” we chortle, crumbs of crumpet spilling from our mirthful lips right into our teacups, “those funny Americans, with their Palins and Bachmanns and silly Fox news dizzily spewing crap everywhere like an incontinent toddler strapped to a ceiling fan. Thank goodness things are so much more sensible over here.” Are they, though? Are they really?

About a fortnight ago, Fox News – which is a bit like ITV with an advanced case of rabies – broadcast a fascinating interview with one of its most prominent critics, Jon Stewart. Stewart hosts the mostly brilliant Daily Show, a satirical news program that sometimes be found in the UK lurking somewhere around the less reputable end of More4. Five days a week, Stewart spends half an hour mercilessly making fun of those in the political spotlight – and, naturally, some of Fox’s frothier zealots (such as the genuinely unsettling Glenn Beck, who finally left the network last week) come in for a fair bit of that ire. Looking to defend themselves, Fox invited Stewart over for a chat with the seemingly-reasonable Chris Wallace, and the unedited footage is a fantastic summary of exactly how news media works in the USA. You can watch it right here (it’s 24 minutes long, but well worth it).

One of Stewart’s more interesting points, which Wallace seems to deliberately refuse to grasp, is that media outlets don’t have ingrained political prejudices so much as a general bias towards lazy, sensationalist reporting that suits their own interests. He’s absolutely right – and any British folks who think that this statement only applies to America should dismount their high horses and have a good close look at the state of things. The Sun, for example, has for the last few years taken a curious line on the News of the World phone hacking scandal, arguing that the whole investigation is a pointless waste of time and money – they even wheeled out Jeremy ‘genuinely aroused by the combustion engine’ Clarkson, who twisted logic into a neat little pretzel by claiming that “if your child is abducted you will be held in a queue and your call will not be answered until officers have decided who John Prescott was meeting for dinner eight years ago, and whether anyone knew about it.” Yes, Jeremy. That’s exactly how the police work. Of course, as Private Eye points out, this ferocious angle may be related to the fact that The Sun and NotW are both owned by the same company. It’s only now, after the whole thing’s blown up like a manure factory pumped full of hydrogen and left everyone involved smelling of burnt turds, that they’ve they finally lifted the smokescreen.

Then, of course, there’s the Daily Mail, the UK’s second favourite paper and most popular newspaper website. Many are happy to deride the Mail as a trashy right-wing rag, but to do so misses the subtle intelligence behind its success. As Nick Davies shows in his excellent book Flat Earth News, the Mail is actually devoid of any political stance in its writing. Rather, it looks at its profitable demographic – the English middle classes – and does its best to reflect their opinions, acting as a sort of amplification chamber which takes their minor worries and prejudices and explodes them into huge stories with headlines like “How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer” or “Council race spies secretly rummage through rubbish bins.” The thing is, the Mail doesn’t have a political stance of any kind, apart from that which it perceives to exist in its readers. That gives it a flexibility that other papers lack: it can run a story on its main pages thumping on about how sexual imagery damages children, while simultaneously filling its women’s section with, er, saucy celebrity photos – and this is in no way problematic. The two sections are tailored to different audiences, and you can’t be a hypocrite if you don’t actually believe in anything. It’s the perfect embodiment of Jon Stewart’s argument.

But then, when Brits sneer at the inferiority of American news, we’re not thinking about the Sun or the Mail – we’re thinking about the BBC, who stick their noses up in the air and proclaim to be above all the daft nonsense that everybody else gets up to. If the tabloids are Bart Simpson, the BBC is Martin, sitting respectably in the corner as the other kids trash the birthday party by getting off their faces on squash and doing a wee in the cake. Yet even in an organisation with a guaranteed income from the license fee and legal imperatives to provide output that’s informative rather than sensational, the BBC is in danger of falling into the same pattern as everybody else. Graham Linehan, the man behind Father Ted and The IT Crowd, illuminated this process when he appeared on the Today Programme for what he’d been told would be a “a discussion about the technical challenges afforded by turning a classic film into a worthwhile play,” but turned out to be “a typical bunfight” in which he was constantly goaded into an argument with a theatre critic who’d been briefed to wind him up as much as possible.

The BBC’s problem is that it has to stick to rigid guidelines on fairness and impartiality, while also competing with the more lurid, outlandish style of its Murdoch rivals. A cheap solution is to turn things into a manufactured ‘debate,’ with two people representing opposite points of view encouraged to have a pop at each other, as occurred in Linehan’s case. This is all good fun, but it can distort the issue at hand by boiling it down to two irreconcilable extremes which are apparently equal in value: with something like climate change, for example, it makes it look like there’s a fifty-fifty split of opinion in the scientific community when in fact there are far more believers than sceptics. Things get even more messy when you consider that the News division has endured huge job losses over the last decade (with more on the way) and yet is still expected to produce the same high level of output – local TV and radio news, a massive online operation, BBC News 24, what’s left of the superb World Service. The inevitable consequence is that overstretched staff don’t have time to properly research stories, follow up leads, or investigate the news in depth – they have no choice but to rely more on ‘easy’ stories, and importing news from other outlets that can often turn out to be a load of old guff. Like, say, the one about Israeli judges ordering the execution of a dog possessed by evil spirits.

So people of Britain, by all means pour scorn on the American media – but save plenty in the barrel, because we’re going to have to dunk our own heads in too. We’re all in the same gondola really, paddling lazily towards a future where even the best journalists are forced to focus on the cheap and sensational. And the worst? Well, on one side of the Atlantic they scream divisive, partisan nonsense, and on the other they interfere with ongoing criminal investigations into the murders of innocent young girls.

Happy Thursday, everyone!